Category Archives: Music

I’ve managed to get by over the last two months plus since coming hat in hand to you kind folks, but now I’m back again. To recap quickly, in June 2014 I was diagnosed at Johns Hopkins’ neurology department in Baltimore with the Secondary Progressive form of Multiple Sclerosis. I can walk short distances using two canes before exhaustion overtakes me, then I need to sit a while to recuperate before continuing on. The diagnosing MS specialist said my history of symptoms gave him the belief that I probably had it for 10 to 15 years already. I agree with that. My mobility problems and the use of my right hand to perform tasks have deteriorated a great deal over the past seven or eight years, but the first signs of strange muscle events happening to me began in at least early 1999. I was blaming what I came to learn was multi-level disk degeneration until I went for a brain MRI last May, when the radiologist asked me if I had MS. To be potentially diagnosed with MS was the reason a neurologist at Hopkins had sent me for the brain MRI.

Although I’ve been going through the application process for months to receive SSI, two weeks ago I got a packet of forms to supplement the application with paperwork I submitted already,

and it took me until Wednesday evening before I had it all filled out, and managed to fax it to the Social Security Administration office in Harrisburg.

Harrisburg Social Security Administration offices

I’ve been getting food from a local church-run food bank, and I have enjoyed the generosity of some longtime friends recently, which has enabled me to remain caught up with bills and have a few incidentals, but I need to pay some bills each month, and I have a neurology appointment at Hopkins in Baltimore Monday. I believe I have at least nearly enough gasoline in my car to drive to Hopkins and back, but I need to pay for valet parking once I get there, as I must request a wheelchair with a transport aide to be brought to my car so I can get to the the neurology office in the Hopkins Outpatient Center.

Driving from West Philly to Hopkins in Baltimore has come to be an extreme challenge physically, and I plan to drive there off the main highways to allow myself to rest easier along the way. This has the added advantage of allowing me to avoid paying tolls. I expect to change my official residence to Pennsylvania soon, and hope to be able to start having follow-up neurology appointments in a well-regarded MS clinic in Philly, so this may be the final time I go to Hopkins for doctor appointments.

In addition to the money to pay for valet parking and several dollars of gas to attend my appointment Monday, I’ll need an additional $142 to pay my monthly car insurance and phone bill by the end of the week. This will keep me current on bills until the first of the month. I continue to keep my fingers crossed that my application for SSI will be approved any day, and that I won’t have a need to keep coming back to my kind friends for additional help. I know people are struggling even if they have decent paychecks coming in reliably.

The most direct method to make a donation to me is to send it to my Gmail address using PayPal. I can give you my Gmail address through a private message on Facebook or Twitter. One can also donate via PayPal from the link on my Authr page. I used to have a Go Fund Me page, too, but they seem to have deleted it due to inactivity.

If anyone wants to see more background on my predicament, I will direct you to previous blog posts over the past year. The living circumstances have changed, but the history holds true otherwise. My long bio is here. My first shorter ask here. More book information with the opportunity to purchase the ceramic sculpture Karen Sparks made for the cover here. Information on buying four-color prints of Karen’s artwork here. Background information on storyteller dolls and related premiums here. More recent blog asks here, here, and here.

Continued thanks to everyone who has contributed to me so far. It’s a humbling experience to ask and to receive as I have. And huge gratitude in advance to anyone helping me out for the first time.

Austria Carol Singers: Locals dressed as traditional carol singers ride on horses on Monday, Jan. 5, 2015 in Dienten, Austrian province of Salzburg. Traditionally carol singers walk from house to house around epiphany to collect money for poor children in other countries. (AP Photo/Kerstin Joensson)

Greetings to all! The major holidays are done. On this second day of the Epiphanyfeast, I hope to persuade more kind souls to continue to help me tread water until my personal cavalry arrives in late May or June, when I will finally be apportioned a third of my late aunt’s estate. Her house and other property were sold. My portion won’t be great, but it should be enough to pay my bills long enough for me to finish writing my intensely-researched book to be entitled Be the Music : How Tori Amos Does it. I can continue writing here at the house of my friends in West Philly, where most of my research materials were recently brought from my storage unit. I now expect to be here for the duration.

I have been deeply touched and humbled by some generous responses to my recent pleasfor help, as well as some of the more expected ones in the form of pre-ordered books. A shockingly kind soul contacted me and said she would take over the payments for my storage unit until I could return to making the payments again. At $214 a month, this promises to end up being at least $1,500. She said she couldn’t bear to lose her things as I had been on the verge of having happen to me, and she also suspected I own some unique and important items pertaining to Tori Amos. (I do.) She reminded me that we met at a concert in 1999 and had a conversation. She also said she heard Tori ask Mikewhy how I was at the fan meet and greet that afternoon. I’m not sure how all that adds up to her helping me out so much, but I am humbled and grateful. Whatever convinced this generous soul to take over the payments for my storage unit, it was about the single greatest thing anyone could have done to help me cope emotionally with this situation of living in the dining room of friends in West Philly while the vast majority of everything I own is in a storage unit in Hagerstown, Maryland.

Some people have donated to me more than once. One longtime friend from Maryland sent me a second $100 donation for Christmas. Someone in California with whom I have never even spoken on the phone, let alone met, has sent several donations and promises more. Someone I never even had an online exchange with sent me more than $100 from South America. Someone I had not heard from in more than 12 years popped up to say she wanted my PayPal email address, so no crowdfunding site would get any of the donation she wanted to send. She said she wanted to repay me—with interest—for a bunch of concert audience recordings that I had sent her on CD many years ago. I expected she might send me $20 to $50 to repay me for the CDs I made for her. We had first met online, then we spoke in NYC on the 2001 tour, then later on the phone once or twice. She SENT ME $500! That was way more than I gave her at 40 cents per blank CD. I was at wit’s end with worry when she did that, and I wept with relief.

I sent in an application via fax to the MS Society for some emergency money on Monday. I had called their MS Navigator just before New Year’s, and gotten an email from them with the forms for the application attached. Their email has other charity information in it such as for Catholic Charities which I have yet to explore fully. I question whether they will accept my application as I sent it, as it lacked a copy of a lease although I asked them for money to pay for back rent, because I don’t have a lease, my friends have just asked me to pay a small amount of money each month. I gave them $250 for each of the first four months I was here, June – September, but I haven’t had any money over and above my other bills and food since then, so I owe them $1,000. [Breaking update at 1 p.m. on 8 Jan 2015: The MS Society called and confirmed that they can’t send me any money for rent or utilities unless my name is on the paperwork, which it is not. They also won’t help me pay my phone bill or car insurance bills. She said she would send me a list of charities to ask for food. She suggested they might help me with rides to doctors, but then when I asked for a ride to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, she said that was farther than they would normally be able to arrange, but she would look into it.]

I spent all but 12 of the last few dollars I had Sunday on food. People here at the house have been sharing food when they prepare it, but some of the most regular sharers left town Monday for a long trip, and most of the rest will leave on a brief tour Sunday. I’ll need to buy more food this weekend. I saved enough cash to pay my January car insurance before it’s due, but my phone bill will be due on the 20th. Even with all of that, none of this is my greatest concern now, my greatest concern is that the house is behind about a thousand dollars on paying utilities, the same amount I had been expected to pay over the last four months. Should utilities start being cut off that would be a catastrophe.

I believe I have a ride to take me to the nearby Social Security Administration office Friday morning so I can wait around for a walk-in appointment to apply for SSI. My online application of months ago was recently rejected because I had not paid enough money into my Social Security account over my work years. I was under the impression that if my application was rejected on that basis, it would automatically roll over as a claim for SSI, but that turned out not to be the case. I had sent them some medical records by postal mail to bolster my case, but they replied telling me I had never applied for SSI. The first appointment to apply for SSI that they could give me was February 11, so I’m going into the office for a walk-in appointment. I hope the Johns Hopkins neurologist I saw in May was correct when she said that having MS is a fast track to getting on disability, and that they accept my claim Friday so I won’t need to rely on the good graces of kind people anymore after this post asking for more help.

If you know me and my PayPal email address, please help me out there if you can spare anything. Any amount small or large will be a great help. If you want to pre-order a copy of my book to be delivered after I finish writing it or maybe buy one of Karen Sparks’ wonderful four-color art prints of Tori Amos, you can head over to my Authr page and select a premium. If you want to donate to help me out, not get a premium, and we don’t know each other, please head to my Go Fund Me page.

Now that I have most of my books and other research materials here out from storage, I can get back to writing again.

There are a lot of distractions in this house, but I will soldier on nonetheless.

Great thanks again to all, and I hope not to need to write another one of these pleas.

Yesterday, three of my friends from the house in West Philly where they have graciously welcomed me into their lives on a day to day basis since six months ago, traveled with me for over three hours in my car to visit my rented storage unit in Hagerstown, Maryland. We rented a U-Haul truck near there on the way. By the time we arrived at the storage facility, it was freezing, windy, and starting to get dark. My friends went through nearly every bit of my storage unit and put all of the research materials they could find into the U-Haul. It remains to be unloaded here in West Philly today on Tuesday. They put a padlock on the back door for overnight. I am bent, and, at least for the time being, broken. I could only drive as far as Towson before needing to relinquish the wheel of my car, but even just being a passenger takes a lot out of me. After a while at the storage unit, my hands felt as if they might get frostbite, and I sat in my car for a few minutes with the engine running to warm up as the headlights were trained toward the inside of the storage unit.

Much of the first floor and basement of my friend’s rented house here in West Philly were rearranged and opened up over the last few days, even an old upright piano was trashed, in order to receive the six bookshelf units of my research collection, and as many of therelevantsoundrecordingsandpapers as they could find while rummaging through the storage unit in the freezing dark. They were on quite a roll for more than 2½ hours, finding most of the items.

It began to snow.

They soon put the various emptied contents of the storage unit which had been placed on the asphalt roadway outside of the unit back into it, and we began our three- and four-hour treks back to West Philly in my car and in the U-Haul truck. I have in the bank, ironically, the sum of $214, the exact cost of a month’s rental of the storage unit which a kind and generous soul began paying on my behalf two months ago. The U-Haul rental was $180-plus with insurance, gas and tolls must also be paid, so I’m already in the hole again just from the trip to get the research materials so they can be made accessible to me and and I can get back to writing. I don’t know how much my state of mind will be holding me back as I worry from day to day where my next meals are coming from or how my bills can get paid in the meantime, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to have these research materials brought here after my friends remarkably suggested remaking the main floor of their house to accommodate them, so I can finish writing my book before the MS overtakes me.

I am now entirely invested into this house in West Philly to, somehow, even with its many distractions, finish writing my book. I am to go back to Johns Hopkins Hospital on Monday for a second MRI on my brain and another neurology appointment, to follow-up on the ones I had there in June, when I was officially diagnosed with the Secondary Progressive form of Multiple Sclerosis. The idea is to see how quickly the disease is causing damage. I am, in fact, getting around better than I was when I moved here in June, seemingly because of the medicine I was put on. I don’t know where the gasoline, tolls, and stamina are going to come from to be able to do this, but I can keep pulling over to recuperate if no one who drives can go with me, at least, I can, if I have enough money for gas and tolls. I already have about half the gas I need in the car.

I still believe the Social Security Administration will approve my application to begin receiving monthly payments under their disability program, but there is nothing to hang onto specifically to believe this is about to happen any day. I will contact the MS Society again, this time for some emergency funds, and hope they can get a couple hundred bucks sent my way, but the red tape involved with doing that will surely be one more thing to distract me and sap the little energy I have day to day. But this is the only way forward that I can figure now as I await the meager inheritance from my aunt’s estate next summer. A recent exchange with my cousin who is the estate’s executor reinforced the idea that this inheritance will be meager, indeed.

Please, if you are able and so inclined, donate anything you can spare to me on Go Fund Me, or with PayPal via my Gmail address if you know it, where I will get every penny. (Go Fund Me takes a small cut.) If you want to donate on expectation of a premium such as a printed book or eBook down the road after I manage to finish writing it, you can go to my Authr page and donate there with PayPal after choosing a premium. More bio and other details can be found at the links to my blog pages which are given on that Authr page, but the current situation in which I find myself as described there changed at the end up May when I had my stuff put into storage and came to this dining room in West Philly. I realize this all sounds preposterous, but this is genuinely some of what I’ve been going through. Thank goodness my longtime friend was able to convince his household to allow him to fulfill his long-time promise to keep me from living on the street.

This friend brought along a framed poster from the storage unit yesterday, putting it into the U-Haul truck as soon as he came across it. He brought it into the house and hung it up on a nail sticking out from the top of a window in this dining room where I live, even as nearly all the other items remain to be brought in from the truck later today. It’s a poster from the 2 December 1999 Jingle Bell Jam, a Christmas festival concert at the Oakdale Theater in Wallingford Connecticut, one of the so-called Blackmail Tour concerts Tori was pressed to perform and did perform despite a miscarriage days before, lest any of the sponsoring radio stations play her music even less than they did already. This concert was the day I posted the message on the Precious Things mailing list and elsewhere which inspired a kind gentleman with outsized faith in me and my abilities to ask me to write a book on this music, which has compelled some of us to travel far and wide to experience as much of it as we possibly could. I think of this poster as a personal manifesto:

I will focus on the crisis at hand. I have just over a hundred dollars in the bank and 21 in my pocket. Even though I can’t stand up long enough to cook, I have enough money to eat for nearly another couple of weeks if I spend every cent. I paid my phone bill for the month, but paid no October rent yet. I’ve been paying $250 a month to stay in my chair in this dining room in West Philly. The Johns Hopkins neurologist in Baltimore who diagnosed me with the secondary progressive form of Multiple Sclerosis in June said to take 2,000 IU of vitamin D per day, which is twice the suggested daily minimum. I take a whole-food style complex made from calcium instead of limestone that enriches bones rather than lining one’s arteries, is absorbed easily, and costs around $60 a month. I like to take additional supplements for my blood sugar, heart health, and a multi-vitamin-mineral pill, and even having cut back some, the dietary supplements still add up to around $200 a month. My auto insurance is paid-up till Jan 20.

I hope to retain my Maryland citizenship status and insurance, as I still consider myself just a visitor here in Philly. I recently sent in the form for a Maryland absentee ballot. I hope to avoid becoming entangled with local Pennsylvania governments from which I would need to disengage before moving back to Maryland. (Food stamps, license plates, etc. I just renewed my Md. driver’s license in August. The Johns Hopkins Hospital system is in my state-based Medicaid health insurance plan, even though I have to drive a good two hours-plus to get to it in Baltimore.)

Eight people live in this house now and there are frequent visitors, but the Internet usually holds out, and it’s good, considering how bizarre it all is. When I came up here from Maryland, I was told I needed to bring very little because there isn’t much space, and that is absolutely the case. I brought few clothes in a weekend bag, have my recliner chair with a motorized lift that I sit in all day and sleep in, have a narrow table in front of me with my laptop that swings away off to the side, and I have a tiny table to my right with three drawers in it. I have a few medical type things such as tape and iodine-based skin anti-bacterial in a bag in the closet, and I also have my coffee grinder, French press device, and that’s pretty much it. My 10 x 30-foot storage unit in Maryland costs $214 per month. If I get behind in the rent for my storage unit which is nearly five hours west of here, I’ll lose everything else I own, and all the Tori Amos items I carefully amassed since 1993 will evaporate as cleanly as the morning dew.

I’ll lose my large, meticulously-collected library of books and their bookshelves, hundreds of original mylar-sheathed magazines and newspaper clippings with Tori Amos interviews, seven boxes of file folders with specialized articles on many related subjects, document boxes with Tori Amos family history and genealogy documents (seriously, you have no idea), and many hundreds of sound recordings that I would need so as to be able to finish writing the book I researched full-time for over 10 years—I read more than 200 books for this project. In addition, I would lose my stereo, televisions, all of my other clothes, furniture, kitchen items, appliances, tools, at least many hundreds of CDs, LPs, various audio and video recordings not related to my book project; I’d lose every one of my historical family papers, and as many as 15 photo albums of family photos. Did I mention my stereo? My speakers may be from 1981, but they’re wonderful.

I will receive a modest inheritance from my aunt’s estate near the end of May once it’s been a year since she passed away. I won’t know its exact amount for another month or so when the estate sale has been carried out and the house has sold, but it should be enough to keep me living someplace—back in Maryland, I hope—where I can bring my research materials out of storage and available to me long enough to finish writing my book, which teaches how to have a deeper experience of music as a listener, composer, or performer, using the life, work, and family history of Tori Amos as examples. My multi-disciplinary approach uses Jungian analytical techniques alongside Stanislavskian acting skills in a manner which has never been proposed for use in the teaching of music on a mass scale. A few singer-teachers such as Liza Minnelli live this and teach something similar, but only to a small subset of performers. My book will also present much new Tori Amos biographical material and never-published family history, some of which I’m confident neither she nor anyone else in her family knows, so Tori people will want to read this book, which I see as my life’s work.

The original investor who asked me to write a book in the first place said he will take care of all publishing-related expenses once the book is written. It’s entirely possible that any day now thousands of dollars of missed pay will show up in my bank account from the Social Security Administration and I will begin receiving monthly payments from them after they approve me to receive disability, but I have no reason to believe this is on the verge of happening. Many report it can take three years or more before being approved, but one Hopkins neurologist told me having MS is a fast track to getting on disability, and I truthfully told the SSA “yes” when asked whether my disability will likely lead to my death, so I expect to be approved without needing to go through an appeal after an initial denial that 70% of applicants receive. Maybe I’m just stupid, but that’s what I believe.

If my research materials and other possessions are lost due to lack of payment for the storage unit before my aunt’s inheritance comes in I’ll be unable to finish writing my book, and the remainder of my life will probably consist of little more than waiting for the MS to overtake me. I have appointments for another brain MRI back at Hopkins in Baltimore on December 15 and a neurology appointment that afternoon in the same building, all of which is designed to be compared with the examinations and MRI from June when I was first diagnosed with MS. I have to say, any ongoing nerve deterioration seems slow, and the insanely expensive drug the neurologist put me on which my insurance pays all but $3 for seems to allow me to get around with much better speed, so in that sense I’ve actually improved since June, and I would reasonably expect to be able to finish writing my book if given the proper circumstances.

I know a few people will help me out this time as they have told me so. I’ll post more later as time moves me to the next crisis. If you are able and so inclined, please donate on Go Fund Me, or with PayPal via my Gmail address if you know it, where I will get every penny. (Go Fund Me takes a small cut.) It takes 3 – 5 days for PayPal to send money to my bank, and I need cash available soon to pay my storage fee on time before November 1st. If you want to donate on expectation of a premium such as a printed book or eBook down the road after I manage to finish writing it, you can go to my Authr page and donate there with PayPal after choosing a premium. More bio and other details can be found at the links to my blog pages which are given on that Authr page, but the current situation in which I find myself as described there changed at the end up May when I had my stuff put into storage and came to this dining room in West Philly. I realize this all sounds preposterous, but this is genuinely some of what I’ve been going through. Thank goodness my longtime friend was able to convince his household to allow him to fulfill his long-time promise to keep me from living on the street.

I remain humbled and grateful for the help I’ve received so far. Anyone wanting to lend me some cash toward getting me to June should contact me so we can discuss it. It takes about $800 a month to continue living here as I am in this chair, although winter heat bills have not been factored into that.

Mind you, I’m not instantly transformed into a far greater fan of her music than I have been. I have no intention to start swimming in her music. But having seen the new BBC doc on her, I can understand why some people are moved to.

Although I soon morphed into a huge collector, early on, Elvis Costello’s songs struck me in some similar ways. The lyrics were heavy on the obtuse, were rife with Britishisms, and I didn’t consider it worth the effort to understand many of them. The difference being that I was extremely drawn in by the music of the Elvis songs, and with the Kate music prior to Hounds of Love, not only was I not drawn into it, some aspects of it majorly put me off. The high-pitched vocals can be wince-ably painful to me, and I prefer melodies which I can apprehend at once and engage with, and Kate’s earlier melodies tend to stray. If she’s going to compose songs that are written “straight through” they need to grab me, such as Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” does, written, notably, when he was 16.

I found Tori Amos’s comments in this Kate doc reinforced some points I made back in March in a blog post pertaining to Kate’s music, and why I am convinced Tori was never copying Kate as many are convinced. Tori said the radio had not been playing much Kate early in Kate’s career, then Tori described when she was in her car when she first heard “Running Up The Hill” and was so struck by it she had to pull over and listen to it. Wikipedia says the RUTH came out in November 1985 when Tori was 22, so there’s some further evidence that Tori never and in no way ever constructed her style in the mold of Kate.

Why some people had become as taken by the music of Kate Bush has long been a mystery to me. I won’t be joining them anytime soon, but I get it now.

I put the unique ceramic Storyteller Doll named Talula that Karen Sparks made for the cover of “Be the Music : How Tori Amos Does it,” up on my Authr crowdfunding site as a premium.

I have loved Storyteller Dolls since I first saw one. I bought one to display where I write to remind me that what I need to stay focused on is telling the story. Storyteller Dolls were invented in New Mexico in 1964 by Helen Cordero of the Cochiti Pueblos. The idea of an elder passing the ancestor stories down to the next generation instantly made sense when I saw a doll, and it is important to me.

My long-time friend Karen Sparks is a wonderfully creative artist who is talented in many media. I first saw Karen’s work in person in 1999 after meeting her online the year before, so I knew how amazing her work is. Long ago she said she wanted to do the cover and maybe other needed art for this book, and I was happy that she said she still wanted to do it when I asked her. One day as I was brainstorming to come up with a cover design for “Be the Music,” I glanced over to the shelf by my turntable, and flashed on what I wanted the main design element to be.

I asked Karen if she was up for making a ceramic Storyteller Doll. Lucky for me she agreed. I suggested maybe the hair might be an orange, corn needed to be in the design, and maybe some pianos would be involved; Tori Amos and many little girls who play piano tell them their stories, so it makes sense that pianos are among the doll’s listeners. With Tori’s 1994 b-side “Frog On My Toe” in mind, in which her late, beloved grandfather she called Poppa has a conversation with her and shares some of his Cherokee wisdom, I’m sure Karen found putting a frog on the doll’s toe irresistible. We went back and forth in email and sharing photos for weeks, but all the wonderful elements and detail of execution are Karen’s.

Once we had Talula, we needed to figure out an overall book cover design. Again Karen wanted to do the art, and I had the kernel of an idea: let’s put Talula in front of a backdrop of mountains near Taos where Under the Pink was recorded in 1993. I found a photographer who makes such photos and sells them online, and she is a librarian, to boot. Lisa made some new images of mountains near Taos for us and we chose one. Then I extracted Talula from the background of the professional photographs Karen had gotten made of her, presented Karen with a mock-up design, then let Karen be Karen to choose fonts and do a final design. It turned out Karen is as talented with Photoshop as she is with other tools. I hope you are as pleased with what Karen created as she and I are, and that you will be inspired to learn more about my book project and support its completion.

Now that Talula has given her all for the book cover, it is time to let her go. I created a premium so you can donate to be able to own her on my Authr crowdfunding site. Talula is approximately 6½ inches tall, 7½ inches wide, 9 inches deep from the bottom of her feet to the rear hem of her dress, and she weighs 1,229 grams [2 pounds, 11.4 ounces]. As a fine work of art, she isn’t cheap, she’s $5,000, but there are premiums going for as little as $2 on the site.

My talented friend Karen Sparks is allowing me to offer up to 12 signed and numbered copies of a four-color art print she made of Tori Amos back in 1998 to help me raise money so I can continue to write “Be the Music.” This is how Karen describes these prints:

On July 28, 1998, Tori Amos performed during the Plugged ’98 tour at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. I took photos from first row, center, and created a silkscreen print with cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I edited the print to include a censorship bar over her crotch. I made approximately 25 of these. Tori Amos has one.

These are printed on expensive heavyweight paper, the size is 22″ x 30″ and the print area dimensions are 15 ¾” x 26″.

Karen tells me the prints she is allowing me to offer are numbered 4 through 15. These have the typical minor variations from one to the other which exist due to the handmade printing process. Each of these will ship within days of your making a $50 donation to help me write “Be the Music” via my Authr fundraising site.